A key concern related to the introduction of wireless video data is the proper synchronization of that data across the wireless data links. Without this synchronization the stream of video data can experience disruptions which negatively affect the video display.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a typical wireless video system. A video data stream is transferred wirelessly from a video source 100 to a video sink 110 (e.g., computer monitor, television, etc.). The wireless video input device 101 and output device 111 provide the wireless, connectivity. The problem is how to maintain synchronization of the video data stream across the wireless interface, so that the video sink 110 sees no disruption of video data.
Current approaches maintain synchronization on a video frame basis. With this method, the wireless video output device has buffering for two complete video frames (A and B). While the data for the current video frame is being read from buffer A, the data for next video frame is being written to buffer B (and vice versa). At startup, video output is disabled until an entire video frame has been buffered. During operation, if the next video frame is not available upon completion of the previous frame, the previous frame is replayed. If no buffer is available for the next video frame, the data for this frame is discarded. Unfortunately, this method requires large amounts of buffering. For example, a UXGA video data stream, 1600×1200, would require 11.0 MB of buffering.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method for maintaining synchronization of wireless video data without the need for the large data buffering employed by current approaches.